Be a Slow Tourist in Gascony, France

With its pristine medieval villages and preserved churches, Armagnac distilleries and duck markets, Gascony is the perfect spot for one peripatetic couple to finally slow down.

"Oh là là, look at the Pyrenees!” Ramdane Touhami gasps, with one hand on the wheel of his Range Rover Sport and the other holding on to his fuzzy hot-pink skullcap. The snowcapped mountain range suddenly comes into view with a biblical ray of light as we tear down an empty two-lane road near the village of Labéjan in Gascony. “Time really stopped here,” says the eccentric 42-year-old French-Moroccan designer and entrepreneur about a region whose swells of electric-green farmland and dense forests are interrupted only by thirteenth-century steeples. Here in this remote corner of southwestern France, ducks are said to outnumber humans 28 to one. It is the land of foie gras and duck confit, of ancient Armagnac distilleries and the real d’Artagnan of Dumas’s Three Musketeers. With its 2,000 hours a year of sunshine, Gascony is known as the country’s “harvest basket,” drawing chefs like the three-Michelin-starred Michel Guérard, who opened the acclaimed La Bastide here in 2011. Still overshadowed by the marquee wine areas of Bordeaux to the northwest and the Rhône Valley to the northeast, Gascony might also be France’s best-kept secret.

My 12-year-old son and I, as well as creative director Yolanda Edwards and her family, are here as guests of Touhami and his wife and business partner, Victoire de Taillac. Her turreted twelfth-century ancestral castle sits at the end of a long cypress-lined road about a mile outside Auch in Luxeube, like an engraving in a children’s fable. Yolanda first met the couple in Paris when she stumbled on their culty perfumery, Buly 1803, on the rue Bonaparte in St-Germain shortly after it opened in 2014. The store is known for its sumptuous water-based perfumes and soaps and fanciful packaging; everything is made by hand from both heritage and natural ingredients and painstakingly sourced from around the world. “My friend used to call me César Birotteau,” says Touhami, referring to the peasant-turned-perfumer antihero of Balzac’s Rise and Fall of César Birotteau. More intriguing to Touhami than the fictional character was the real-life early-nineteenth-century celebrity perfumer Jean-Vincent Bully, on whom the character was modeled. When Touhami and de Taillac discovered that the atelier was still producing a single product, they decided to “develop the legacy of L’Officine Universelle Buly” (the second “l” was dropped), much as they’d done with Cire Trudon, the seventeenth-century candlemaker. The store itself is an artful interpretation of an archaic apothecary outfitted with a custom burled walnut and oak cabinet of curiosities and hand-laid blue and cream Etruscan-style floor tiles.

You could likely match the signature fragrances, like the Scottish Lichen, Damask Rose, Makassar, and Mexican Tuberose, to stamps in the couple’s passports: In their 18 years together, they have lived in Tangier, Jaipur, Brooklyn, Paris, and now Tokyo with their three children, ages 13, 11, and 8. But when you spend time at their family home in Gascony, where nothing changes, Buly’s mission to revive “the grand classical beauty store of the nineteenth century in both service and decorum” starts to make sense. “My family has been in Gascony from the fifteenth century,” says de Taillac, a descendant of one of Dumas’s royal guardsmen whose grandfather Guy and Scottish grandmother Jane bought the château in the 1920s. “Not a joke, but we lost our original family place during the Revolution.”

Loosely circumscribed by the Pyrenees to the south, the Garonne River to the east, and the Atlantic to the west, Gascony (a large swath of which is officially called Gers) is made up of pristine medieval villages like Agen, Montréal, Condom, Larressingle, and Auch, which first emerged as rest stops for pilgrims en route to Santiago de Compostela, some 500 miles away in Spain’s northwestern Galicia. Even the French call Gascony (from the same root as the word Basque) “God’s country”—unspoiled as it is in part by the absence of big-name vineyards or attractions. It’s also been dubbed “the Tuscany of France,” only most Americans have never heard of it, which of course makes all the difference. There’s a centuries-old foie gras market every Monday morning in Samatan, a handful of Armagnac distilleries that may or may not open their doors for you unless you call ahead, and hundreds of preserved churches—from twelfth-century Romanesque to seventeenth-century late Gothic, often within a single structure.

Despite the couple’s peripatetic existence, de Taillac decamps here for summers and holidays and slips into her simple country life of food shopping, cooking, gardening, and hosting friends without missing a beat. To experience Gascony, we soon discover, is to give into the quotidian, to stroll through the markets, to duck into churches—like the Cathédrale Ste-Marie in Auch, with its 113 carved oak choir stalls—on the way to a typical hearty Gascon lunch of cassoulet or magret de canard. If you stay in the perfectly distressed bed-and-breakfast Le Consulat, in Auch, with its threadbare Persian rugs, crisp linens, and simple baguette breakfast served at a communal farm table, you will wake up to church bells and imagine what it might have been like to travel through Europe 50 years ago.

Early on Saturday morning, we trail de Taillac and Touhami through the farmers’ market in Auch, where plump artichokes and purple gem lettuces spill out of wooden crates. The whole scene, including the slate boards with names and prices in loopy Catholic-school script and the cast of gruff elderly vendors, also looks as it probably did half a century ago. Wearing a knee-length cotton skirt, chunky frayed sweater, and flats, de Taillac collects ingredients for an early-spring lunch, poule au pot for 15 or maybe 20 people (“because you never know who will come”), without a shopping list. Fresh-faced and gamine with a scarf tied around her head, she is an anachronistic foil to her restless partner in his decidedly urban suspenders and bright cap. “She is elegant, she doesn’t have to show it, it’s natural, deeply in her,” Touhami, who seems to pace even when he’s standing still, says of their creative and personal partnership. “I’m more aggressive, a new way, less polite, but in time I’m becoming more polite. She taught me codes.”

Whereas de Taillac would happily return to Gascony every month, Tou­hami, the son of Muslim-Moroccan apple pickers who grew up in the countryside 60 miles east in Toulouse, travels every two weeks. Recently, he relocated the family from Paris to Tokyo to open a Buly outpost there. “He likes to open every book in the family library, talk politics and family history with my mother, play football with our son,” she says of her husband’s abbreviated visits to Gascony, “but he grew up in the countryside and he gets bored after a few days and needs to move.” De Taillac, meanwhile, is a poised seventh arrondissement aristocrat who crosses herself reflexively when we enter the cathedral in Auch. Yet sitting on a couch with her head on Touhami’s shoulder, she seems to let down her patrician guard a bit, as she must when making a home in foreign cultures. “I guess I have very good genes to adapt myself in any country, finding what we like, making us feel at home,” says de Taillac, who was born in Lebanon and whose mother’s side of the family is spread out all over the world. “For us, moving to a new country is the best way to travel.”

The constant push-pull of heritage and creative license, of tradition and disruption, seem to be the driving forces for the couple’s professional and personal lives. This tension, rooted partly in class, culture, and character, has given rise to a singular lifestyle and aesthetic, as seen in the Buly 1803 stores now open in London, Taipei, and soon Tokyo and New York City, as well as in their homes. Even their courtship—which began in the late ’90s when de Taillac, then the publicist for Colette, had to run interference on Touhami’s cheeky T-shirt line Polette (a send-up of the iconic concept store)—was sparked by playful opposition. In their division of labor, he does all the design and she chooses the textiles for the stores, as well as the clays and oils, and tests all of the products. At home, he designs the common areas while she does the bedrooms. Of their personal natures, he quips, “I talk first and think after. She is the opposite.”

Photo by Oddur Thorisson

Produce markets in nearly every town are a colorful way to spend a couple of hours—Saturdays in central Auch, the Monday duck (or foie gras) market in Samatan, Wednesdays in Condom (pop into the Cathédrale St-Pierre).

Between the two, our families are given the ultimate insider’s—and slight outsider’s—perspective on Gascony. “Everything old is for sale, people want new houses with a swimming pool,” says Touhami. He is momentarily distracted while driving by the town of Mirande and the new campaign headquarters for the rising Right-wing National Front Party, which stands out in this otherwise Leftist enclave. “The people here have nothing, zero. You have more people who don’t work than who do”—a sign of stagnation in a region whose main industry is traditional farming and distilling. It occurs to me that despite driving for hours, we haven’t seen a single big-box store or even a supermarket. As we consider the sweeping expanse of green fields and forests dense with pine, oak, and birch, it’s easy to imagine the region as a safe zone for the French Resistance. Its historic impermeability to invasion—not only by the Nazis but by the British and the Huguenots before them—and therefore to change is undoubtedly part of the romance of the place. This, coupled with its relative remoteness (the nearest airport is in Toulouse), has made Gascony an unwitting epicenter of slow tourism—save for the private planes of those noble families lucky enough to drop in on weekends.

By the time we get back to the house, it’s nearly cocktail hour, and a collection of family and friends are sitting by the fire in the grand yet unheated living room, drinking Champagne out of century-old coupes in a half-circle of centuries-worn antique chairs. From a surprisingly modest kitchen, in which the newest appliance might date to the 1960s, comes a tray of foie gras–slathered toast points, delivered by de Taillac’s elegant silver-haired mother as casually as one would offer chips and salsa. When I look back at the dark foyer, I see the glow of Touhami’s face behind a laptop as he taps away to find a return flight to Paris the next day.

Photo by Oddur Thorisson

The entry hall at Le Consulat in Auch comes by its unwitting steam punk aesthetic honestly.

Gascony Brief

Hotels in the region are relatively scarce, which means no major chains and few tourists. A handful of these are gems that are attached to pilgrimage-worthy restaurants—a godsend after a multi-course meal and a bottle of wine. The major towns (Auch, Agen, Montréal) are all within roughly an hour of one another; rent a car at the Toulouse airport (if you’re flying) and use meals and markets, which are open only on certain days of the week, to bookend your days. The rest is all about looking out your car window and ducking into churches in these movie set–like medieval villages.

Places to StayLe Consulat, near the center of Auch, is basic yet charming in that Europe-40-years-ago kind of way. Hôtel Lous Grits is a slightly more sanitized, upscale French country option. Hôtel de Bastard, in Lectoure, has a solid restaurant with multi-course menus. And Gascony Secret is a reliable house rental agency for larger parties.

Where to EatBaptiste Ramouneda runs family-founded Le Florida, in Castéra-Verduzan, serving classic Gascon cuisine. La Bastide, about 45 minutes from Auch toward Bordeaux, is an outpost of chef Michel Guérard’s. (You can also spend the night in one of the hotel’s 25 bright if unremarkable rooms.) La Table des Cordeliers, in Condom, is known for its inventive seasonal menus from Michelin-star chef Eric Sampietro, while La Halle, in Jegun, serves hearty Gascon classics.

Other Stuff to DoThe towns of Castéra-Verduzan, Lectoure, and Barbotan-les-Thermes are known for their thermal baths and spas. Armagnac-tasting in the Château de Larressingle is highly picturesque, while the Armagnac distillery De Montal is a more industrial operation. Un Coin du Passé, in Castéra-Verduzan, is the kind of antiques store where you might find a stack of perfect vintage tea towels for $30.